Reconstructing the Life Histories of Enslaved Africans: Sierra Leone, c. 1808–19

This paper examines the identity, origins and "disposal" of the first cohorts of recaptive Africans released at Sierra Leone in the immediate aftermath of British abolition of the slave trade. Although these liberated Africans had been prevented from completing the Middle Passage by royal naval vessels stationed off the coast of West Africa, they were still forced migrants subject to colonial control and various forms of coerced labour. Many young males were compelled to enter the service of the Royal African Corps and the Royal Navy, whilst other recaptives were apprenticed for up to fourteen years in a system attacked by contemporaries as another form of enslavement. Recaptives apprenticed to male and female settlers provided various forms of labour and service, and a number complained of neglect, abuse and mistreatment. With the exception of Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s narrative, there are few extant sources containing direct testimony of the traumatic experiences of recaptives in the early nineteenth century. This paper, therefore, explores how nominal linkage of fragmentary sources generated by the expanding colonial bureaucracy in early nineteenth-century Freetown makes it possible to reconstruct aspects of the life histories of men, women and children uprooted and displaced by the transatlantic slave trade. This research sheds new light on the experiences of the recaptives and the survival strategies adopted after their release. This paper draws on recently re-discovered evidence from the Vice-Admiralty Court at Freetown, which provides a rare opportunity to trace the names, appearance, age, identities and experience of large numbers of enslaved Africans. As many of the recaptives remained within the Crown Colony and its hinterland, the identification of their areas of origin also informs understanding of the diverse influences which shaped cultural formation of the settlement in the first decades of the nineteenth century.